Cheryl Goldberg of Goldberg Communications wrote an excellent blog post summary about New Research Describes the Most Effective Ways to Market with Content.
Allow me to summarize Cheryl's summary.
- Three major new studies have been published about content marketing over the last few weeks. All validate that content is a critical component to marketing efforts.
- White papers remain the most influential types of content (but only if they’re well written).
- The influence of white papers depends on the size of the customer. Both decision makers and influencers from enterprise and mid-market companies are more likely to pay attention to a white paper than their small business counterparts.
- Ninety-percent of B2B marketers use content to grow their business with the computing/software industry having the highest rate of adoption of content marketing strategies.
- Case studies are also valuable content. One study showed 67% of respondents using case studies to make technology purchases.
- What disappoints people when reading white papers? Poor writing quality and papers that are not technical enough (remember, survey respondents were primarily from high tech/IT) and those lacking real-life cases.
Good stuff.
At HRmarketer, we've touted the benefits of content marketing for a decade and our most recent Trends in HR Marketing report validates that HR vendors are catching on. And our HR Buyer reports show that HR decision still place high value on quality content.
In fact, our HRmarketer Services Group typically won't work with a company if there isn't a process in place to produce content on a regular basis.
Why?
It works. Seriously, it really, really, really works. And not having content really, really limits your chances of marketing success.
Benefits to you? Thought leadership, branding, lead generation and improved SEO (if you value those sorts of things).
And it's so darn cost effective. Say you invest a few thousand dollars in producing a great white paper. Look at what you can do with it (in no particular order):
- Place the white paper on your website for download.
- Announce it's availability in several press releases.
- Share it with your LinkedIn connections.
- Share it with your company's Facebook fans.
- Blog about it.
- Tweet about it.
- Send it to your short list of analysts, press contacts and bloggers and explain why it is newsworthy/important.
- If you have a newsletter, mention the white paper in the next issue.
- Send a direct email to your house list announcing the availability of the white paper with a link to the landing page.
- Consider renting a targeted email list and do the same - great way to build your house list.
- Recycle and revise the white paper into a 800 -1,000 word byline article and submit/publish in an industry trade magazine that accepts byline articles.
- Consider doing a webcast on the white paper topic. Maybe even a podcast (now we're getting bold).
- Reload and repeat the above steps.
But remember, don't just slap something together because that will most certainly hurt you more than doing nothing at all. The content must be well written, well designed, well timed, compelling and non-promotional.
Serve the King of content in 2011 and make it a part of your marketing plan - maybe even the foundation.
Post by HRmarketer CEO Mark Willaman. Join Mark on LinkedIn and Twitter.Labels: content marketing